Behaviour Change

PROPAGANDA FOR CHANGE is a project created by the students of Behaviour Change (ps359) and Professor Thomas Hills at the Psychology Department of the University of Warwick. This work was supported by funding from Warwick's Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning.

Thursday, March 16, 2017

Open
Your Eyes - Populism

To
address the rise of both left and right-wing populism
in Europe and the United States, we created a short infomercial portraying the aspects
of globalisation, social identity and
other psychosocial facets of modern populism as objectively as possible. By raising
awareness, we hope to cast aside the personal identity confusion found within our society nowadays. Our goal is for people to refrain from adhering
to extreme left or right-wing populist parties. Instead of thinking black and
white, we believe it is better to employ a more nuanced, critical stance when
looking at the current issues.

We hope to have affected people’s sense of responsibility by using the following persuasion techniques:

The conversion theory of minority influence - Contrasting the "majority rules" model of social influence, conversion theory maintains that disagreement within the group results in conflict, and that group members are motivated to reduce that conflict—either by changing their own opinions or attempting to get others to change.

The mere exposure effect - Repetition of the word populism in our video and on
the news, creates a sense of familiarity, thus adding strength to our message.

The priming effect - Add in the effect of priming the extreme left and
right-wing parties with an uncertain and frightening outcome, and a more
critical, centred stance towards politics is to be expected in just under four
minutes.